To continue my story about my Acme Bread experience... I wanted to do something nice for all the great people at Acme on my last day. I have come to a point where I often want to say to people, "My feelings would best be expressed in a cake..." (You know, Mary Katharine Gallagher style.)
The cake flavor that best expressed my gratitude to Acme was chiffon cake with fresh whipped cream, organic raspberries, and a thin layer of tempered Ghirardelli White Chocolate. (This cake flavor combo is Cole's invention.) Paying homage to the Acme craft, this would be my take on Artisan Cake. A hand-crafted design inspired one of the classic (and my new favorite) Acme breads, Pain Au Levain. Here is my sketch for the cake design.

I began assembling the cake immediately after my Tuesday shift ended around 11:00 AM. I stopped at Berkeley Bowl West for some last minute ingredients and a fresh loaf of Acme's Pain Au Levain (shown below) that I like to think I rolled earlier that morning.

I figured if I was bringing in this cake to work the following day at 3:00 AM, it might be consumed around breakfast time by some people so I wanted the cake to be light, refreshing and not too sweet.

I really like this photo that Cole took this photo while the cake stand was spinning.

Amazingly, once the cake was done spinning... it looked like this:

Ok, maybe I skipped a few steps. But I just wanted to get to the point already because I'm so excited to show off this cake!!!

As you can tell, I am pretty darn proud of this cake. I can't say I've ever seen any other cake like it. I kind of surprised myself how much it started to resemble the real thing. The fun part for me was that the more "imperfections" I could make on the fondant, the better it would start look.

I used powdered food coloring, which I think allows you create much more dimension. Here I am decorating the cake. Clearly, I'm in the zone. The danger zone.

Cole replicated the Acme Bread logo for me since he is my resident Font Guru. I think he did an amazing job! His detail brought the cake to a whole new level.

Here is a real bag for comparison:

It was so fun to see everyone's reaction to the cake at Acme. We kept the cake in the walk-in refrigerator until about 10:30 AM. Mike kept bringing people inside the walk-in to show it off, which I was loving. I finally put the cake on display in the Acme break room right before I left. (PS - do you like my "cutting board cake stand"? I thought that was a nice touch.) I even sliced it open to make sure that it would be enjoyed. After all, there was a really good cake under there, despite all the fondant trickery going on outside. I only had my iPhone on me at the time, but I snapped a couple pictures just "for the record".

Despite how delayed this post is, I'm actually dying to hear people's reaction to this cake. It was one certainly one of my favorite cake projects so far because of the whole journey associated with it and I'm just excited to finally share the photos of the finished product with everyone!